On The Electronic Disturbance Theater

The Critical Art Ensemble is a group of five network activists/artists working together to advance the theory and implementation of Electronic Civil Disobedience. One of their publications "The Electronic Disturbance Theater" which is available online with instructions to freely pirate and quote, just let them know you are doing it -yeah right, I wouldn't feel very much like a pirate now would I?

It is a great read and I plan to blog all 142 pages ;) -it is that good. However as blogs are not supposed to be all that long I will probably tackle this in chunks and do this in multiple parts. I might even turn the blogosphere upside down (literally) by publishing these in CHRONOLOGICAL order. Here goes...

On the Virtual Condition (chapter 1): Wake up people, the world is no longer analog. Our culture's grand quest for world domination and power through technology have reduced its people to data. More so everyday, everything we do and everywhere we go we are leaving a trail of data like a snail leaves a trail of slime. Bad analogy I will edit later. Case in point, I am leaving a data trail right now, as soon as I hit publish. Even if I delete this post at a later day there is a chance someone made a copy to read later, or a robot crawler found it and added it to a permenent archive. I went to a silicon-flatirons conference on how "old" media is transitioning/dealing with new media and one of the speakers speculated that some day we would read a presidential candidate's blog from when s/he was a teenager. Wow, I said a lot of stupid shit when I was a teenager. I say a lot of stupid shit now. But I am typing it anyway.

I like the idea that there has always been a "virtual" -it was just called mysticism, abstract analytical thinking, and romantic fantasy. We are living in exciting new time, our imaginations have now taken form through technological manifestations and our virtual is now real... or at least visual which is at least 20% real. No matter how bad this bullshit seems to get, we have to have some sense of pride and awe that we are alive to experience this pivotal era in our sorted history of humankind. Bow down, bend over, get out of the way, or turn off the machine, it's your choice.

EDT part two

This is a continuance of The Electronic Disturbance Theater.
On Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance (chapter 2)
Foucault would have loved this chapter. The Sythians were the original nomadic superpower, they were able to create fear and compliance in those they conquered because they did not exist.

"I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Kaiser Sose."

The Sythian's constant movement allowed them to never have to take a defensive position and produced paranoia and fear in the non-Scythians that they were always susceptible to attack. Fast forward to today. Sound remotely familiar? Believe in conspiracy theories? Do you feel like you are being monitored? Are you your own self-surveilling panopticon?

Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries (chapter 3)
Subjective memory has always been a problem. The invention of photography was a temporary solution for a brief period because it represented a concrete visual record. This is no longer true; the photograph is no longer a scientific tool. Photoshop and even the Photo Op has ended the innocence of photography as visual truth. The documentary, however, has always lied at either 24 or 29.97 frames per second. If you consider yourself to be information literate then it is critical that you study the works of documentary filmmakers from D.W Griffith to Errol Morris to Michael Moore. "The quality documentary does not reveal itself." Keep the images flowing seamlessly. Do not give time for self-reflection. Use a tripod, keep the camera steady. Do not make the viewer aware of the camera and disrupt the suspension of disbelief.

"the documentary does not create an opportunity for free thought, but instills self-censorship in the viewer, who must absorb its images within the structure of a totalizing narrative."

I love documentaries, but I do realize they are fictional propaganda, and I try to ingest them as such. Some of my favorites are uncut amateur videos taken at protests, they are often aired on free speech tv. These rough, jerky shots are the farthest thing from professional filmmaking and this makes them feel closer to the original purpose of the photograph -a solid witness.

Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art - Suzanne Lacy

Mapping the Terrain is a collection of essays edited by Suzanne Lacy and published in 1995. The introduction, written by Lacy, gives a good analysis about the history and strategy of creating public art.

New genre public art is distinguished from its predecessor "public art" in that it is not about the object but is based on the relationship between the space and the audience. Where as old-school public art, and incidentally what most people think of as public art, is a sculpture in front of a corporate building. Re-watch fight club if you are not sure what corporate art is. Originally it was seen as a way to revitalize inner cities and create jobs for sculptures, but public meant that it was to be moved outside the gallery and viewed in a public space, the actual people that comprised the public had nothing to do with the process. New genre public art moves away from this corporate art paradigm by working with the communities in which the art is placed. Open dialog is encouraged between the artist and the people that are going to actually have to live with it. New genre art is often based on liberal ideals and speaks about issues relevant to the societal culture in which it is placed.

The goal of Mapping the Terrain is to provide first hand accounts of the design and implementation of new genre public art so that young artists can have insight into the processes and strategies of moving public art forward. It is equally a great resource for net artist because much of our work takes place in space (virtual) and involves a community of people.

Net Art: Building Something Out of Nothing -Josephine Bosma

(more subtitle) Self Education, Collaboration and Networking article

B.I. (Before the Internet) - wow, that's great. Never heard that before.
Moving on.

History is written by the winners. Net.art history is written by your friends. This review of an article written on net art history was written by me.
Moving on.

Bosma argues that net art is and has been: writing, cinema, radio art, sound art, music, kinetic art, conceptual art, performance art, mail art, digital art and video art. It is now popular, however, because of advances in technology. Particularly the small one in 1999 when Netscape created RSS, not built specifically for blogging, but blogging florished because of it anyway and with it: online writing, cinema, radio art, sound art, music, kinetic art, conceptual art, performance art, mail art, digital art and video art.

In the early days before the internet (b.i. - I just love that) it is interesting to read about the early experimentations with rudimentary shared networks, old crappy computers and really expensive and faulty internet access. We know - it sucked! That is why we have Moore's law; technology will always improve and make things a bit easier. It probably really sucks right now, although we won't realize it until many years from now when we look back and say "I can't believe I had to blog using my fingers."

When the machines are on and your fingers are on the keyboard, you are in connection with some space that is beyond the screen - I got turned on by the space! - Robert Adrian

Net Artists! There is division amongst our ranks. If we are to continue to beable to afford our high-priced broadband and upgrades to our hardware and software, not to mention food and shelter for our weak organic bodies, we must ©UNITE! Apparently there are those of us who prefer to create art for the screen a.k.a. 'click and go' web art, and those that prefer to create complex net projects that involve (and depend) on many end users to furnish the content, or by simply just "being" - are in fact, the art itself. Cheap shots are being taken from both sides of the aisle. We are also divided into independent artists doing it solo and those that seek sponsors in larger institutions such as the government, universities and god forbid -art galleries. While we were squabbling and fighting over virtual air time we have unleashed an attention economy (LOOK AT ME ;)

What we have with net.art is, we have a sort of shifting paradigm in art from the idea of representation to the idea of communication. For communication you don't need a lot of skills. You can use very simple software, which is widely available -Alexei Shulgin

Final note, I met Mark Napier in 2002 when he presented and spoke about potatoland.org at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I would have liked to have read Bosma's article that did not exist until three years later. Anyway, it was nice to learn that he was a painter before net art and that in 1995 he started experimenting with html by posting his paintings on his home page. Then he realized his paintings were no longer paintings and if he screwed with their pixels they became something totally different. This happened to me, exactly.

Crazy.

Net.Radio and The Public Space (Josephine Bosma)

The two main arguments presented by Josephine Bosma are:
1) Net art needs to be presented in physical public spaces
2) Net art needs to be documented and archived

I experienced "net happenings" through John Hopkins (the net artist not the hospital -slightly different spelling) while he was at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His classes spent the semester preparing and then hosting a net happening. The actual event itself lasted 24 hours and the physical space turned into a crazy twisted hallucinogenic party with everything from techno sound pumping to video projects covering most wall space (there may have even been a disco ball). It was incredible for a college course, we felt pretty privileged that we were having a pyschodelic party in the middle of campus and we were blown away that people from all over the world were joining us via web cams and IRC. Net artists half way across the globe would send us streaming video that we would remix and send back out. I went home in the middle of it to find what everyone outside of the university was experiencing. It was ok, certainly not on the same level as what was happening in the physical space.

Just as Bosma pointed out in her article, our net happening was neither documented or archived. John has left the building (actually the country) and all the students in his class have graduated and are gone. If I were to host another net happening I would have to start over from scratch and make all the same mistakes and have all the same technical difficulties that John had.

Moral of the story (and Bosma's article) - next time you create net art, do it in a public space and please document it.

Josephine Bosma: Vuk Cosic interview

Vuk Cosik interview

Although this piece was written in 1997 Vuk Cosic asked what he considered a rhetorically pompous question "does the globality of the audience automatically mean the universality of the topic". Well Vuk, let me help you out five years after the fact.

No.

The part of the article that resonated with me was when he argues that net art conferences is actually net art. I was an invited artist at FILE 2004 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The symposium brough in net artists from around the world and we together we formed a net. We had interesting conversations of the past, present, and future of net art. That felt more like net art to me than being online at home.